A major contribution to studies of Anne Spencer specifically and to American literary and cultural criticism more broadly. Ferrari has engaged carefully with all the extant critical work in the field and pushed the level of scholarship to new heights. This book will prove of immense value to readers with an interest in the Harlem Renaissance and civil rights movements and to poetry readers, social historians, and cultural critics alike.

While Do Not Separate Her from Her Garden is not a biography, Ferrari’s meticulous archival research, explicit reverence for Spencer, and decision to integrate personal narrative into the book’s preface and coda cultivate a sense of intimacy that mirrors the affinity biographers often develop with their subjects. Ferrari’s move to share space with Spencer in this way ultimately heightens the stakes of her project: in addition to serving as an inquiry into the possibilities that emerge when we refuse to separate Black women from their material and proverbial gardens, Ferrari’s book illustrates the possibilities that surface when we cease to separate Black women from each other in the gardens they come to share.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Ferrari’s well-crafted study takes on the task to examine this ‘audaciously untypical woman’ (p. 82) as an ‘unsung cultural theorist and early environmentalist’ (p. 59) . . . The study’s greatest strength lies in its exploration of ‘unconventional archives’ (p. 122) . . . [Ferrari] shows how an ecocritical lens can help attending to alternative modes of archiving, thus multiplying historical perspectives and bringing to light stories that institutional archives may obscure. This invitation to consider the richness of nontraditional archives seems particularly vital at a time when pressures to create singular, exclusionary narratives of American history threaten to marginalize the very perspectives such archives make visible.